1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to cooking apparatuses and, more particularly, to a cooking apparatus which precisely detects a weight of a food, and performs cooking for a suitable cooking time corresponding to the detected weight of the food.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, an automatic cooking apparatus, such as a gas/electric oven or microwave oven, automatically cooks food according to a previously set control method. The automatic cooking apparatus requires food information, such as a type and an amount of food, to automatically cook the food using a suitable amount of heat for a suitable cooking time.
The food information is provided by a user through an input unit of the automatic cooking apparatus. If this food information is manually input by the user, the user must use a separate weight detecting unit so as to precisely detect the amount of the food. If the separate weight detecting unit is not provided, or if the user regards the use of the separate weight detecting unit as labor, which is troublesome, to roughly estimate the amount of food and inputs the estimated amount of the food to the automatic cooking apparatus, errors may be generated between the actual amount of the food and the input food information. Due to the errors, a control unit of the automatic cooking apparatus may not determine the suitable cooking time and the suitable amount of heat, thus the quality of the food may deteriorate.